We Need Cops Like Mike Brown Needed a Hole in the Head

The Ferguson community is rightly outraged over the fatal police-shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown and the broader problem it represents: how American blacks are treated like a subject population under military occupation. They are also right to be doubly outraged at how the police state that dominates them has been baring its fangs and pushing them around with a fully militarized response to their protest.

It is good that they want justice for Mike Brown and the mitigation of police impunity. It is also good that the public is now finally aware of and deeply concerned about the militarization of the police. But this has been a decades-long, losing struggle. By now, it should be obvious that the police state, and especially its treatment of blacks, will never be fundamentally reformed.

You might ask, “Well, what else can we do but keep trying?” My answer may initially take you aback, but hear me out. Abolish the police, at least in Ferguson and any other black community that has had enough.

The notion of doing without police may seem as outlandish as abolishing parenthood or outlawing air. But police forces are not some timeless, sacred feature of human society. In its modern form, policing was actually only developed in the past couple of centuries. And tellingly, it originated directly out of imperial domination. As Will Grigg puts it, modern police forces have from the beginning been:

“…paramilitary bodies designed to operate as occupation forces, rather than as a protective service. In creating his London Metropolitan Police, Robert Peel adapted the model he had employed in creating the “Peace Preservation Force,” a specialized unit within the 20,000-man military contingent Peel had commanded as military governor of occupied Ireland.”

With this in mind, the long-running subjugation of blacks by the American police state (which recently has also been trampling on ever more non-blacks as well), and the accelerated militarization of police and sheriff’s departments, should come as no surprise. These developments are not perversions of the institution of police, but a coming to fruition. Pretenses notwithstanding, this is what government policing has always been about.

Mustn’t I be exaggerating? Aren’t the police necessary for public peace and security? Aren’t they the “thin blue line,” as they like to boast, that stands between good citizens from criminals? If one afternoon we were to be without cops, by nightfall wouldn’t criminals be everywhere running rampant, causing injury, destruction, and chaos, like when the police went on strike in Robocop?

What happens when the police go on strike, according to Robocop.

If, for a moment, we drop assumptions we have imbibed since grade school, and just consider this question in light of recent events, and of general principles, we might be surprised at the answer we arrive at.

Case Study: Ferguson

First of all, there was the initial shooting of Michael. The contact that led to the shooting was initiated by the police officer because Brown and his friend were walking in the road. Now, what would you expect someone whose function was to preserve the peace to do in this case? In general, you would expect him to de-escalate, as opposed to escalating the situation. Now, since the teenager was not impeding traffic, and not presenting any danger to person or property, the situation was already completely peaceful, i.e. maximally de-escalated. So the officer escalated by simply initiating the contact at all, especially since he did so by barking an expletive-laden order at the teens. This is indisputably true, even if the witness account of the officer’s subsequent rapid escalations—aggressively pulling up to him, grabbing him, threatening to shoot him, and then actually shooting him—is not perfectly accurate (although it very well may be). This “peace officer” had escalated the situation which went from zero to homicide in seconds. A young man who moments before was almost home, doing nothing more than jaywalking, lay dead in the road, with blood draining out of his head.

And then when Brown’s community congregated to mourn and protest his killing and to call for justice, how did the police deal with the delicate situation? With more escalation. They responded with an immediate, aggressive display of police force: the very thing most likely to provoke a riot in a crowd already outraged by the police.

And after provoking unrest, how did they react to it? They doubled-down on escalation of course, with full-spectrum dominance and martial law, wheeling out all their paramilitary gear, including materiel they had received from the Pentagon that had been used for “shock and awe” in Afghanistan and Iraq: tank-like Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles (MRAPs), full body armor from head to toe, assault and sniper rifles, tear gas launchers, stun grenades, and even sound cannons. The cops stormed around in full armor, pointing their assault rifles directly at unarmed protesters, blasting protesters with chemical and sonic assaults as well as rubber bullets, and generally showing a level of aggression that shocked even Iraq War veterans. Many vets claimed to have acted with far more restraint, even when in insurgent-filled locales like Fallujah. The cops even threatened, gassed, and arrested journalists. Everything they did either directly created or engendered more conflict, violence, and chaos.

And then, suddenly they were called back, and were gone. What happened then? Was it like the police strike in Robocop? Was it even more chaotic than when the cops were there? Was the crowd a cauldron that was going to boil regardless of what the government did. Did the police crackdown at least put a lid on it?

Then the city and county police were replaced by highway patrol officers, led by a chief who played “good cop” to the prior “bad cops”: marching with protesters, and even hugging them.

This didn’t last long, and eventually the cops reverted to form, resuming their assaults and orders to disperse, and imposing a curfew. Protesters who, during the brief armistice, had been chanting, singing, laughing, and dancing, were back to dodging tear gas and shouting at their tormenters. The cops had returned, and chaos returned with them.

So much for fostering peace. But how did the police perform when it came to security? Most protesters were peaceful, if angry. But there were some looters. You would think with all that armament, the police could roll in and easily ward off or arrest the unarmed thieves. But the police did absolutely nothing to protect private property. They were there to squash political expression and intimidate the uppity serfs, and that was it. Any property that was protected from looters was secured, not by cops, but by armed, private owners and good-Samaritan protesters linking arms at the entrances.

Was this complete failure of the Ferguson police to carry out their alleged function due simply to the exigencies of the situation? One indication that this is not the case is their treatment, years before one of their officers gunned Michael Brown down, of Henry Davis, a 52-year-old welder who ended up in Ferguson after taking a wrong exit. He was mistaken by an officer for another man named Davis, arrested, caged (even after the mistake was realized), forced to sleep on concrete, and, when he complained, beaten severely. The Ferguson police later sued him for property damage, since allegedly he had dared stain their sacred uniforms with his blood as they beat him. And yes, this really did happen.

So then is Ferguson just a particularly dysfunctional police force? Do other police forces do a better job keeping the peace and providing security?

No, as a survey of police activity, both during protests, and in everyday contacts with citizens will show, the police almost always escalate situations, as opposed to de-escalating them.

And the notion that we have the police to thank for our security in persons and property from the depredations of common criminals is a myth.

Enemies of Security

To understand the interest that the police has in public security, one must understand the nature of the state itself. The state is not an agent of the public, commissioned to provide security; that is just the cover story. The state is, as Albert Jay Nock put it, a “monopoly of crime.” Its whole function is to systematically coerce (“regulate”) and plunder (“tax”) the public. It only combats other coercers and plunderers because it simply doesn’t want the competition. It is a band of big-time criminals that, when it kills or imprisons small-time criminals, is essentially saying, “Back off: this is my turf, and those are my victims.”

This explains why the criminal “justice” system hardly provides any actual protection or restitution for victims, but only neutralizes its competition by throwing non-state criminals in a cage (which only makes it harder for their victims to obtain restitution from them). This is why the police have “Call 911″ (code for “Don’t bother me”) painted on their cars and then take their sweet time showing up when you do call 911 to report an actual crime: unless of course they suspect that drug offenses are involved, in which case it is a plunder opportunity for themselves, and so they will swoop in like avenging furies.

As Tom DiLorenzo has written: “The police are, at best, crime historians who show up after a crime has been committed, write up a report, and then use the report to lobby for more money to hire more police, who take down more reports.”

After all, how do you feel when you see a cop on the road? Do you suddenly feel more “secure”? Not really, right? To the contrary, I’ll bet your blood pressure spikes, and you suddenly feel uneasy and paranoid. That is because you know that, even if you haven’t hurt anybody, your likelihood of being, however temporarily, deprived of liberty (i.e., being detained or arrested), and being deprived of property (i.e., being cited or charged) just skyrocketed, especially if you’re black and/or poor. You feel less secure, because you know you are less secure in your person and property: the very things cops are alleged to make secure.

You are not only at greater risk of being detained and shaken down, but of being brutalized if you somehow piss the cop off. In fact, you are eight times more likely to be killed by a cop than by a terrorist.

The police enjoy “sovereign immunity,” which basically means they are legally nigh untouchable. As long as they are clocked in, the worst that a cop will suffer for aggressing against an innocent, no matter how egregiously, is losing his job. He’ll almost never be charged with a crime, and he’ll more likely just be given some paid vacation before being reinstated. This near total impunity frequently has precisely the effect one should expect: reckless disregard for the rights of others and rampant childish indulgence in one’s basest urges, which means violence induced by hyper-sensitive pride, indignant scorn, steroid-addled rage, “officer safety” paranoia, power-mad sadism, and even rapacious sexual lust. Just look through the archives of PoliceStateUSA, Copblock, The Free Thought Project, or Liberty Crier to see countless instances of this playing out.

Even when they restrict themselves to executing the law, most of what cops do is trample on the rights of their fellow man. That is because most laws that are on the books are completely unjust. All mandates of behavior and prohibitions of any activity that does not directly violate someone else’s person or property are fundamentally unjust. (To understand why, read For a New Liberty by Murray Rothbard.) And most laws that cops are tasked with enforcing fit that description.

The police not only fail to provide and directly threaten security, but many of the ways in which they threaten it corrosively undermines security by systematically making it harder for individuals to provide it for themselves. They have turned their War on “Crime,” including especially their War on Drugs, in to a veritable War on the Home. At least 124 violent, paramilitary SWAT raids are executed in America every single day, most over victimless crimes. Some jurisdictions now serve every single warrant with a SWAT raid. Most raids are executed in the dead of night while the residents are sleeping, often in order to prevent the destruction of drug evidence they can use to win more Federal money. Seeing black-garbed armed men bursting into their homes, many residents, especially those living in tough neighborhoods, understandably think they are being attacked by non-governmental home invaders, about to rob, rape, or kill their family, so they go for a gun or other weapon for protection. And since cops are trained to cowardly treat “officer safety” as a divine imperative, the terrified “king of his castle” is unceremoniously deposed by being gunned down in his underwear.

Just about anything you do to protect your home—from just owning a registered gun to merely having burglar bars—puts you at greater risk of suffering one of these paramilitary assaults. As Will Grigg has written:

“Gun ownership is one of the key considerations in the standardized “Threat Matrix” used in planning SWAT operations. A representative Threat Matrix form lists a number of individual criteria that dictate “mandatory” SWAT deployment; in most circumstances, the confirmed presence of firearms falls into that category. This is particularly true if a home has “fortifications,” such as burglar bars – or, in the case of the home targeted in the Akeny raid, security cameras.”

How can you provide for your own security against the depredations of common criminals when doing so can make you and yours dramatically less secure against the depredations of the state?

And of course, especially if you are black and/or poor, the government often won’t even give you permission to own a gun to protect yourself, your family, and your home, and so cops will arrest you on “gun charges” if you try to.

So, cops not only provide no security, but their assaults undermine a man’s ability to provide it for himself. They even undermine man’s recourse to his most timeless and rudimentary security precaution, the household dog, since invading cops routinely shoot dogs, even when the animal is obviously posing no danger.

The police are antithetical to peace and security; they don’t provide it, they directly attack it, and they undermine it. You need them like you need a hole in the head (or like Mike Brown needed a police-provided hole in his head).

After all, think about the good people in your community: concerned fathers, loving brothers, and guiding mothers and sisters. If the cops marched out tomorrow, do you really think they would stand helplessly by when and after crimes occurred? And don’t you think local businesses would have every incentive to protect their property and their patrons in a way that respects the rights of their patrons and neighbors? Who, after all, would patronize the businesses that don’t?

Don’t Support Your Local Occupation Force

If you cannot bear the subjugation anymore, fire your cops. This is your community; tell them to get the hell out. If they don’t leave, perform mass civil disobedience until they do. Don’t call them, don’t help them, don’t serve them in your business, don’t even talk to them. And don’t try to democratically “reform” them. Withdraw your consent and express your contempt, through signage, through speech, and through the internet. Peacefully stare them down. Keep standing your ground until they stand down.

But, most importantly, don’t be like them. Respect the rights of others, including them, even if for no other reason than the fact that you need to cultivate the sympathy of your fellow countrymen in order to succeed. Never hurt the persons and property of innocents. Never attack anyone who is not presently attacking you. And never respond to force with disproportionate countervailing force.

There has been a lot of talk of “demilitarizing” the police, but again, the whole function of the police is and has always been to serve as an extractive military occupation. Demilitarizing the police would be like trimming the claws of a predator; it may reduce its deadliness for a time, but it won’t change its predatory nature. And the claws will grow back.

Rather than demilitarizing the police, we should de-police-ify our communities. Only then will the systemic brutality stop. Only then will “open season” on civilians (especially black civilians) be over. Only then will we be free.

39 thoughts on “We Need Cops Like Mike Brown Needed a Hole in the Head”

You must be crazy or one of the chronically malcontented. What do you think would happen if there no police controlling the riots and the looters? Who will stop them? You? This is a tragic incident that is once again being used by the race hustlers and other demagogues who use these people as their power base, but do nothing for them. And this portrayal of this thug who stole from the store and overpowered the much older and smaller owner as some sort of innocent is outrageous. After running from the scene of his crime he encountered a police officer with who he got into a confrontation perhaps fearing to be caught for his recent crime, and the situation got out of control. Yes, the officer over reacted but to portray the officer as a person who just decided to shoot some innocent person is ridiculous.

@Joe and Taylor— the rioting and looting discussed in the article happened BECAUSE of police— I think the writer has a good point. I haven't called the cops in over a decade— with one exception. My car had just been broken into— IN FRONT OF ME— and the cops, whose station was four blocks away, refused to send anyone. They promised to mail me a "victim report form" that never came. These days, I refuse to call the police at all—- In the unlikely event they actually showed up, they might arrest or kill ME, or an innocent bystander.

Joe, did you even read the article? The police provoked the unrest (in fact since cops committed most of the violence, they were the ones who were doing most of the rioting anyway), and they didn't lift a finger to stop the looters.

I read the first 2 lines of your bleeding heart, liberal tirade in disgust and that's as far as I got. Brown died of existing while being terminally stupid. You don't attack a uniformed police officer, try to take his weapon, and then come back with the apparent inclination to try again and expect to get a good citizen of the year award. Small wonder he got shot. As much crap as the police have had to put up with there, I'm amazed they've been able to resist killing a whole lot more of the feral, violent thugs burning, looting, throwing molotov cocktails and the like. Blacks, although a minority of the population, commit an overwhelming amount of the crimes against property and persons. If you've been the victim of a violent crime, chances are great the perpetrator is black. Police know this and also are aware that statistically, any black they approach has a good chance of having spent more than a few years locked up for commission of a felony. How then, would you suggest they approach them other than with caution? Carrying a flower to offer and singing kumbaya? Foolishness.
Personally, I don't trust the police and have been vehemently against their ongoing militarization. I do everything to avoid them at all costs. This means being as law abiding a citizen as possible. Pity black don't see it the same way. All the lies of the press corps covering this affair have proven to be just that, lies. Brown is not the "gentle giant", harmless and well intentioned young man with a future as he's been popularly portrayed. He was a violent thug as the cigar store video of him strong arming an older and much smaller person demonstrates. Between the Trayvon shooting and the Zimmerman verdict 513 days elapsed. During that time 11106 blacks were killed by other blacks. Where's the outrage over that? Every year, 35000 white women are raped by black men and statistically zero black women are raped by white men.Where's the outrage against that? The media goes to great lengths to not report and obscure the extent to which blacks commit crime in this country. Read Colin Flaherty's book "White Girl Bleed a Lot" if you haven't already. That should give you pause next time you're inclined to write a totally factless opinion piece such as the above.
Last, I read somewhere someone alledged that outside agitators have been coming into Ferguson and fanning the flames as it were. I've known this from the get go. They're called journalists. The events in Ferguson are exactly the kind of reaction the MSM was hoping to result from their false outrage over the Trayvon shooting. A nice big, photgenic eruption of violence. By the way, who' going to clean up the mess and pay for the repairs when this is all over? Not the residents, that's for sure. Look to the white taxpayers that have been funding the fraudulant "war on poverty", "war on crime" and all the other "wars" and "program" to raise up a minority that is neither capable nor deserving of such largesse. A return to segregation would be the biggest favor that could be done for blacks. Then finally, penned up in their own little world's, once again they'd have to start doing something for themselves instead of blaming all their inadequacies on "de legacee ub de slabbery"

Funny, how do you know the piece is "factless" if you didn't, by your own admission, read beyond "the first 2 lines" before plopping out this previously digested, paragraphless wad?

You know, I wasn't sure at first whether to consider you just another "law-and-order" (or "rack-thumbscrew-whip-and-firing-squad") conservative with the racial heebie-jeebies, some stupid Stormfronter or a run-of-the-mill troll. But in light of your *studiedly* divisive and inflammatory racialist tone—including your over-the-top segregation comment and your little stab at minstrel show dialect—I think that you're actually a troll on a mission:http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2014/08/trolls-wha…

We wouldn't want folks discussing the *real* issues—like the police and their role in the general decline of liberty in America—, would we? But we *do* want potential readers and donors to think that a libertarian-run site dedicated to peace abroad and civil liberties at home is frequented by rabid racialists, right?

You question my methodology, accuse me of being a "troll" but I can't help but notice that you completely ignore the facts I present about black crime and black's violence against whites. Get a statement from one of those 35000 (reported) white women raped by feral blacks if you really want an earful. Get a statement from someone that's been a victim of the "knockout game" for collaboration. Or just wander along with your blinders on and completely ignore the massive wave of black criminality direct mainly at whites. You also conveniently ignore my statement about not trusting cops, and being opposed to their militarization. Seems to me that you're probably what they call a "disingenuous white liberal" on the SBPDL website. You'll protect my rights to free speech only so long as I agree with everything you say and believe. You seem to think I'm the last of a dying breed? Guess again. You need to come out of that liberal haze you're living in and go read some of the comments on less moderated sites such as Breibart. You'll find what I'm saying is pretty representative of a lot of white Americans these days. People that just a few years ago would have kept shut just to get along. To paraphrase a line in a movie from years ago; "We're mad, and not going to take it anymore".

Does the black community, in the wake of decades of welfare statism and its attendant Cult of Victimhood, have some serious problems? Sure. But that's not what the article was about. It's about the general uselessness of—and positive harm wrought by—police. Many of the protestors in Ferguson are not violent; and they were *most peaceful* on the one day that no cops were there to gas, assault, arrest and threaten them. (Fancy that!) Some protestors have even helped protect businesses from looters—something which the worse-than-useless cops absolutely refuse to do. But they all get the same jackboot treatment as looters—and so do journalists. Of course, this all seems okay with you, your disingenuous claim that you don't trust the police notwithstanding.

Moreover, even if one were to accept the absurd assumption that the entire black minority (only about 13 percent of the population) in this country is comprised of "feral" devotees of the knockout game, they still wouldn't present an eighth of the threat to the rest of us that the ever-expansive state and its armed minions do. And one hardly needs to point out that police crackdowns and police abuse are not just for black people anymore.

Of course, as a troll who wants to lead the discussion into a racialist cul-de-sac and poison the site by your mere presence, none of this matters to you. As far as I'm concerned, however, you can be a troll all you like; I just think people ought to know what sort of creature you really are.

What kind of creature am I? One that's sick of a criminal underclass ruining this country and sucking it's resources and collective objectivity dry. Philosophically, my outlook on blacks is very similar to that of Dr. Albert Schweitzer, quoted as follows…
"I have given my life to try to alleviate the sufferings of Africa. There is something that all white men who have lived here like I must learn and know: that these individuals are a sub-race. They have neither the intellectual, mental, or emotional abilities to equate or to share equally with white men in any function of our civilization. I have given my life to try to bring them the advantages which our civilization must offer, but I have become well aware that we must retain this status: the superior and they the inferior. For whenever a white man seeks to live among them as their equals they will either destroy him or devour him. And they will destroy all of his work. Let white men from anywhere in the world, who would come to Africa, remember that you must continually retain this status; you the master and they the inferior like children that you would help or teach. Never fraternize with them as equals. Never accept them as your social equals or they will devour you. They will destroy you." Dr Albert Schweitzer, Nobel Peace Prize Winner 1951 ("African Notebook" 1939)
Never lived in Africa myself but I did have a 30 year career in management that required me to deal with black's and their pathological behavior on way too regular a basis. So my philosophy is formed by not only being on the sharp end of the stick, but by personally being the victim of a robbery when I was in college as well as by "trivial" things such as the crime stats and occasional remarks following.
Blacks are seven times more likely to commit murder than other races, eight times more likely to commit robbery, and three times as likely to use a gun. Forty five percent of Black violent crime is against Whites while forty three percent is against Blacks and ten percent against Hispanics. Blacks are 39 times more likely to commit a violent crime against a White person than vice versa and 136 times more likely to commit robbery. Black rape of White women is 115 times more likely than White rape against Black women. These figures were published in an August 25, 2007 column by Pat Buchanan. He wrote, “The real repository of racism in America — manifest in violent inter-racial assault, rape and murder — is to be found not in the white community, but in the African-American community.”
12.6% of Americans are black alone; another 1% are black in combination with some other race (2010 Census). Yet blacks commit the majority of homicides: 50% in 2004, 53% in 2005, 55% in 2006, 54% in 2007, 52% in 2008, 52% in 2009, and 53% in 2010 (FBI Uniform Crime Reporting Program). The black murder rate is consistently about 8 times higher than the white murder rate, meaning blacks are 8 times as likely (700% more likely) to commit murder as whites, on average. From 2004 to 2008, about 84% of their victims were black, while 16% were white and Hispanic. http://tinyurl.com/6na67ss
I visit this site regularly and have contributed to it financially in the past because I'm overwhelmingly in favor of it's premise of "anti war". If my presence here "poisons" it as you say, tough. This web site should constrain itself to its self declared mandate; that of being anti-war and refrain from getting involved in racial issues and controversies. If you want to associate with the criminal psychopaths I've described above, commonly know as "blacks" or their new, preferred form of address "African-Americans", be my guest. As for myself, I'll continue to be an evil wayciss with the following philosophy for all people of color and most religions other than traditional Christianity and/or northern European paganism; "avoid them when you can, tolerate them when you have to, never turn your back and never, ever trust them".

The only answer to government thugs is to end the monopoly on force. Lew Rockwell had a post post awhile back that promoted the idea of anarcho-police force. Free market security in which wrong doing by security forces are held accountable by their customers instead of getting paid vacations.

"This article is so wrong on so many levels" – except if the cops are criminals themselves, and this has been proved to often be the case. Where I live, the narcotics unit would bust drug dealers, seize the drugs as evidence – and then sell the drugs themselves. This scam went on for five years until someone called a halt to it – but only one cop got probation, the rest walked free. Quite a set up, eh?

It’s a shame that more people can’t open their minds to the ideas Dan has presented. The first time I read such a thing, I scoffed as well. But the state fails miserably across the board in trying to protect the rights of it’s citizens and in fact is, in its very existence, the negation of liberty. Bottom line: we certainly couldn’t do any worse on our own.

I called the police once when i was robbed . a witness saw the robbery and called me . The police did nothing so I called the county attorney . He said I should sue the robber . I don't him I would rather sue the county and the police . I called the county commisionor .He told the sherrif and the county attorney it sounds like stealing to him I wanted my property back . Never got it back but the sherrif told the guy he should not come onto my property any more .

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